Poison is the Color Red
by paired discontinuity
Summary: Part of Acid Holes. How many times have they done this by now? Looped and danced and watched the end of the beginning. But this time, Taiki has an all new plan of action. It starts with tearing off the mask. Xros Wars AU. Warnings inside


_Notes: Non-binary character using binary pronouns. Also death, child abuse, violence, pain and... think that's it for this chapter._

* * *

 **Chapter One: God's Teachings**

Agony.

She wakes up in agony for the seventh day in a row. Something is very wrong.

She's used to pain, though. She is the child of a great and terrible existence. Pain is commonplace in order to cope with the power. But not like this. Not through every atom of her form.

Slow down, she tells herself. Remember who you are. Remember your name.

She exhales, hiccuping. She wipes her eyes. She isn't a child anymore, right?

Your name is Kudo Taiki. You are fourteen years old in six months. Your mother is Suzume Tsubasa. Your father is Gabriel Kudo.

Your name is Kudo Amou. You are the seventh wielder. Your mother is a human. Your father is a devout worshipper of god, almost a god himself. You are over a millennium old by someone else's watch.

" _Be the Mary Magdalene or the Messiah. You have only one real choice to make."_

The Crusades are coming. Your father's mournful whispers are in your ear.

They are coming with the jackboots and the fences and the bloodied flag. She shuts her eyes and sees a natural red fabric. She shuts her eyes and sees the battlefield torn and ruined. She opens her eyes and winces. There's a new bruise at the side of her neck. There's a heavy weight against her right side. The weight of a small life, she realizes quickly.

For a moment she has forgotten what day it is.

Then, she sits up, smiles to herself. The pain fades into the ends of her bones. She tunes it out and gets up. Her hair is messy enough. It doesn't look like she's a person with bedhead, but a messy boy with slightness to his frame. She sighs to herself. This is how she has to survive.

This may be how they all have to survive, on lies and tricks and games and chess pieces.

She sighs, musses up her hair a little more, then sets to work. She flicks her hands about the room. Specks of light flicker and then fade in an instant. She runs her hands over her eyes and turns them soft grey, like storm clouds. The darkness of her skin mutes to something lighter.

Beside her, the small thing rolls over, dressed in blacks and covered in red marks.

She walks to her door and cups her throat with one hand. "Mom, we have a guest!"

Her mother answers back with the same speed that she always has.

Taiki relaxes.

Everything is still fine.

* * *

Akari catches her just in time to save her head. Akari knows, of course, that her best friend is not an ordinary boy. He's not really an ordinary anything.

(She tried to call her 'they' whenever she could and while Taiki appreciates the sentiment and feeling behind normalizing it, she isn't ready for it yet.)

She is used to sports, to binding and dodging bullets and bullies. She is used to standing up to people as boys did, not calling attention to herself too much on things that she wasn't supposed to do.

Except for the helplessness. That was always there, in the back of her mind like a crying little child that had been quashed by a wooden hand and merciless kindness. So she helped people to get rid of it.

"You need to be more careful."

Taiki nods mutely to Akari's endless scolding, but her eyes flicker red at the touch on her shoulder. Akari misses it. Thankfully. She doesn't want to drive her only friend away, even though that would be the smarter thing to do, in the end.

"Don't worry so much," she chirps to interrupt, smiling too much. "They needed my help and all, why couldn't I stick my neck out? And look, I'm fine, see?" She flexes her arm in a pantomime of the boys in the locker room and thankfully Akari starts laughing.

"Don't do that, you goof." She doesn't elbow her in the ribs, she's learned against that (Taiki doesn't remember how, but Akari does and thus she respects the personal space and careful touches that Taiki needs.) "You look so weird!"

"Aw, that hurts." It doesn't, really, because she knows she's playing a role, playing a game, having some fun. It's harmless, after all.

She hesitates, The question tickles her sides, her stomach, her insides. "How is Tatsuya?"

Akari blinks at her, surprise written on her pores even. She is surprised at herself to be fair. It's not that human affairs don't concern her-

" _Do you really believe you are better than them just because you have power?"_

Because they do a little too much, but as Taiki knows, she's often wrong, and seeing that wrongness in scars that aren't her own is distinctly… unpleasant.

She smiles? "Have you been too busy with me?" Taiki hopes not, that's why she doesn't like bothering Akari in the first place. But then, Akari does things it anyway.

Akari shakes her head, a little too fast but Akari is a bit too fast so she overlooks it.

(maybe she shouldn't)

And it's almost peaceful, the longer the day goes and it's almost peaceful when they get lunch and enjoy a pair of juiceboxes and sandwiches and for a few minutes Taiki can really forget.

Then there's a pressure behind her eyes and her knees almost buckle with the force of its intensity on all levels and like a toll bell a bokken slams into the ground.

A challenge rings out and she doesn't really hear it because her father's voice, her first tutor's war cry, their words are mixing and somewhere, someone is dying.

* * *

It takes time, these things.

Tsubasa understands, deep down, that she is a human and fragile and a pawn in the war, the great war for humanity. But she does not raise her child with that mentality.

She will not look after this one.

Black hair, streaks of gold running under it like the lines during the gold rush, matching the big bright eyes looking up at her. The little boy who had refused to let go of her child's pant legs like she was the demon.

She was not, thankfully. And this child would not be either. They smelled of dark nights and rejection.

He wasn't a grandchild. Amou was simply too young by human standards and she would have known by now. He was too old, but he smelled non-human enough that perhaps this was a rival's child, a casualty in the endless brotherly quarrel of pity and disdain.

" _He believes he is disliked by god,"_ she remembers her husband saying. _"Disliked and weak and like a leech. I can't tell him he's wrong."_

But he hates humans as much as any misanthrope,

Tsubasa places a lunch out for them and smiles. He smiles back, mute and confused. Or perhaps not mute, but unable to word his confusion. That was fine. This child had appeared from nowhere after all.

She had chosen to be where she was. The least she could do was dig into it further, see what she could unearth. But first it is time for her daily run.

"Do you want to come with me?" she asked him. He nodded. "All right, Sammy, shall we go?"

Another nod, and Samuel, time traveler, slips out of the chair and into his first sight of a human world with a sun.

* * *

 **Challenges:** What if Challenge, Halloween Trick or Trick Bag, Character Spinoff Challenge, AU Diversity Boot Camp (character facets!AU) prompt-suffer.


End file.
